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Comment by radicaldreamer | Hacker News Reader

High end audio delivers an experience which cannot be easily quantified for the listener. It's just like wine, most people (even many wine experts) can't tell wines apart, let alone rank them in double blind experiments, but drinking wine, from the presentation to the bottle to the company you're keeping at the time is what brings it together.

It could be anything in that bottle at that point, but the emotions of that holistic experience are what matter.

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Unlike wine, music really comes down to knowledge, experience and training. Sound and our interpretation of it by the human ear have had rigorous study. Much of it is quantifiable. We know the optimum frequency response of our ears is around 85dBSPL, for example.

Things that are just peoples perceptions (like "brightness") have technical terms (amplitude of harmonics).

Sound engineers aren't doing black magic. If you reduce dynamic range too much through compression you can end up with a sound that people find "boring".

I'm sorry but there are things that very quantifiably sound terrible.

(I am a musician, I have run live sound and mix my own music.)

I totally agree, there's certainly going to be stuff that most people, audiophiles included, would consider better or worse.

What I mean though is there are certain aspects that can't be reduced to technical terms- like going to listen to a live performance from an artist who isn't going to perform any longer or listening to a piece on a rare, hard to produce system. The value isn't coming directly from the technical aspects of the production for the listener at that point.

For sure, but I wouldn't call somebody wacko based on that sort of aesthetic difference.

I reserve wacko purely for people who claim performance benefits from things which cannot be proven or measured in any way...or are provably false.

If you are summing up the whole experience rather than the audioformat, then you really don't have anything comparable. If one format really is better (and even that is subjective), then there needs to be a repeatable experiment that proves it.

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